“Did Ripley wind up giving Duke a job?” Nell asks.
“Rampart!” Emily is forever astonished by the depths of our ignorance, though I knew the answer to that one. “It was Ripley’s show. It won ten Emmys.”
“Did Duke win?” Maisie asks.
Emily shakes her head. “Two nominations, no wins. No one understood him in those days.”
I can remember watching the awards show with my cousin Sarah back in New Hampshire, the two of us sitting in my grandmother’s bed because the better television was in her room. The camera panned regularly back to Duke. Even in a roomful of television stars he was the glittery thing. “Him!” I pointed to the screen. “That’s the guy I used to date.” They showed him in profile, laughing, his tuxedo slim and immaculate, the tie undone.
“Then who’s the girl he’s with?” my cousin asked, like Duke had been busted for cheating.
“I’m not dating him now. I have no idea who she is.”
She is a creature of inestimable beauty, I wanted to say. That’s who she is.
“What I want to know,” Nell says, the bucket around her neck half--full of cherries, “is what became of you.” She is wrestling with the knowledge that I’d been given everything she’d ever wanted, and that I’d given it away.
Emily and Maisie look over at their sister, then they look at me.
“What do you mean, what happened to me? I married your father. We came here. We had the three of you.”
“But how? I always thought you and Daddy fell in love at Tom Lake, that you dumped Duke for Dad and then the two of you went from there. But you left Michigan without even calling Dad from the airport. When you went to Los Angeles, did he stay here?”
“He stayed the rest of the summer helping Maisie and Ken, then he went to Chicago to direct a play.” Was it Chicago?
“Did you write to him?” Emily asks.
I shake my head. I didn’t know enough to write to Joe in those days.
“How long was it before he found you?” Maisie asks. Something in the construction of her question touches me, as if Joe had gone door to door, searching for me all that time.
“Three or four years,” I say. New Hampshire was its own eternity, as was New York. I did not tally up those days.
“So tell us about going back to New Hampshire,” Emily says, cheerful at the thought of additional chapters. “Tell us about New York. Tell us about when you met Dad again.”
“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat down. I thought, Joe will come home and find the three of them framing out a playhouse with my bones.
“You said it wasn’t a story about a famous man,” Nell reminds me. “It was supposed to be a story about you.”
“It was a story about me, the whole thing. But I can’t tell you every minute of my life. We’ll die of boredom.”
Maisie faces down the long row of trees, every one of them covered in cherries. “We’ll die of boredom anyway.”
I would pull off every last bit of fruit myself rather than go back there.
“A sentence,” Nell says, as if this were an improv class. “Start small. See where it takes you.”
I think about it. Those hard years can, in fact, be distilled to a single sentence, and so I try. “I went back to New Hampshire and stayed with my grandmother until she died.”
I was her favorite and she was my favorite. My grandmother married my grandfather when she was eighteen, and had her first child, my mother, at nineteen. My grandfather worked for the railroad and she could sew and together there was enough to keep them going. They had five children, the fourth of whom was a sleepwalker. Brian got out of bed one night when he was six, went down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door into the snowy night. Even asleep, he knew to close the door. When my grandmother went to get everyone up in the morning, Brian wasn’t in his bed. She looked all over the house and then went outside without her coat. She found him down at the end of the driveway by the mailbox, frozen to death. Her remaining four grew up fine. Over the years they brought fourteen grandchildren home from the hospital. Go look us up—-Kenison—-we’re everywhere. My parents met in high school and also married young, everybody married young back then. They had their two boys straightaway: Heath, who they called Hardy because he was, and Jake. That was the family. That was what they’d wanted. But when my mother was thirty--five I came along. Thirty--five sounds like nothing now, it sounds young, but being pregnant when she already had two big boys, one of them playing football on the varsity team, mortified her.
I would say nothing against my parents or my brothers. They were good to me, but there was from earliest memory an understanding that I would live mostly at my grandmother’s house six blocks away. My grandfather had died of emphysema and everyone said she needed company, insofar as a very small child can be company. I suppose I didn’t live completely with her but I was mostly with her, playing with fabric remnants and ribbon wound onto spools while she worked. The alterations shop had a small selection of needles and yarn because we didn’t have a knitting shop in town. When I got older, my mother would watch me knitting a sweater at the breakfast table and say she was sorry she hadn’t paid more attention to her own mother’s attempts to teach her things. I tried a hundred times to teach her myself but my mother was like a border collie. She couldn’t sit still for it.
My grandmother and I though, we were the absolute masters of stillness. She taught me to play honeymoon bridge, how to watch movies while silently keeping up with my stitch count. Those were the days before audiobooks, and she asked me to read to her while she sewed, following my progression from The Little House in the Big Woods all the way through Moby--Dick, which I never would have finished were it not for her insistent requests to hear another chapter. Every book I had to read for school, along with all the ones I read for pleasure, I read to her. This was probably the origin of my acting, as I can remember her telling me to be a little more interesting, and then later on to be a little less interesting. When I played my first Emily in high school, she helped me memorize my lines and I helped her make the costumes. We each had a copy of the play and we read it through breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“She’s just like you,” my grandmother said. “The smartest girl in the class.”
My grandmother had been the smartest girl in her class as well, everyone said so, but there wasn’t much to do with that distinction once she’d married on the Saturday after graduation. Five children made for a full life, and then four children did the best they could to make life full. Her math was sharp, it had to be to make patterns and run a business. She kept the red leather--bound dictionary her husband had given to her on their first anniversary on the bedside table where another woman might have kept a Bible. She wanted me to go to college, and then she wanted me to go to California and be an actress. She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting. “Look at her getting up on that stage like it was nothing,” she said to her friends. I went off to the University of New Hampshire, and after that I got on a plane to California and checked into a hotel room all by myself. I amazed her.